1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of editing a figure or a drawing, which is drawn by means of a personal computer and is displayed on a display unit of the computer. The displayed drawings such as a map, a flow chart or a block diagram comprise a plurality of drawing elements. Drawing elements of the drawing to be edited comprise, for example, straight lines, curved lines, circles, circular arcs, rectangles and so on. According to the editing method of the present invention, drawing elements of the drawing which are designated by an editing area are edited such that lines included in the drawing elements are not left broken in the edited drawing.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Computer programs for drawing figures or pictures on a personal computer are well known. Further, it is known that a picture drawing apparatus for drawing pictures is available as one of the functions of a conventional word processing machine.
For example, a map such as shown in FIG. 8(A) can be drawn by the picture drawing apparatus.
Generally, in the conventional picture drawing apparatus, however, once a drawing has been drawn, it is difficult to modify the drawing. In particular, it is difficult to change drawings such as a map and a flow chart because they include a number of lines.
For example, assume that, while drawing a map including a station 100 and a street 102 as shown in FIG. 8(A), an operator wants to change the map so as to draw the street 102 far apart from the station 100 as shown in FIG. 8(B). In this case, moving an area of the map surrounded by a broken line 104 to an appropriate location, the operator can obtain his (or her) desired map. But, in the conventional picture drawing apparatus, many lines which cross the broken line 104 may be left broken in the resultant map as shown in FIGS. 8(D) and 8(E). As a result, the operator is required to do a time consuming work to connect these broken lines.